...Drone Know What It Is*

Two stories that caught my eye in recent weeks, one about drones, one about mosquitoes.  See what I did there?  Aaanyway....

There was an article in the first week of July in The Paper Of Record about training military drone pilots, which seems like quite a misnomer: "operators" or "controllers"  seem more to the point.  Please correct me if I misunderstood, Col. K ( a recently-added fanatical reader and my advisor on all things military), but the droners who are killing insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and Sudan and wherever else our peace-prize-winning Pres. is selectively having people killed are not actually in those countries.  They're in Mitt Ronmey's Amercia, the good ol' SUA, as Stephen Colbert had it.  Essentially they're commuters playing lethal video games.  They might have a mission in Iraq in the morning, break for lunch, then "go" to Afghanistan or (shhh) Pakistan in the afternoon, then commute home to spend the evening in front of the TV or at a Little League baseball or soccer game.  Landing the things sounds fairly difficult: the signal from the on-board computer camera (Skypeing with drones!) has to bounce off a satellite on its way to Cali or wherever the operator is, so there's a several second delay.  Things don't happen in inhuman human real-time.  That also makes it difficult to hit moving targets, as you might expect; one rebel leader said that, as soon as they hear a drone, they start moving around as quickly and erratically as possible.  At least, like those bad guys in Westerns, we're makin' 'em dance.

"Researchers estimate that mosquitoes have been responsible for half the deaths in human history," according to an article in The New Yorker for July 9&16 of this year.  That statement stunned me, but seems not implausible (how's that for straight-shootin' syntax?) when you think about it.  The prime culprit is Aedes aegypti, which transmits malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile virus, and several types of encephalitis, among other things.  That species is not native to the Americas; it most likely arrived on slave ships in the 17th century, which I find cosmically hilarious and maybe the best modern example of Dante's contrapasso.

So scientists, particularly from the British firm Oxitec, have been experimenting with genetically-altered mosquitoes, and have already released millions into the wild.  They are implanting two genes into laboratory mosquitoes; one of them is just a marker to identify altered bugs.  The other, though, is an instruction to manufacture a certain protein at a level far  too high to maintain healthy new cells.  Sounds sorta like cancer, no?  They implant these things into creatures, breed them, kill all the females, since only females bite ("Only women bleed us"), and release the males into the world.  The males die after mating (life span is 10 days) as do any eggs that may result from this mixed breeding.  Pretty ingenious, huh?  Except that, since the only way to differentiate between genders is by size--females are significantly larger, and how would you get their little legs apart, anyway--scientists estimate that, for every 3,000 males released into the wild, one female looking for blood goes out, too.

Now on the face of it, both of these things sound pretty good, right?  I mean, if our military can kill whatever group we currently deem the enemy while being on a whole 'nother continent, that's great.  They'll be out of harm's way, the bad guys get offed, we win.  And mosquitoes undeniably cause untold human suffering (Google "dengue fever," for instance) and death, so why not get rid of them?  It's pretty well-accepted by biologists that they're not at all an important part of the food chain, especially since, evolutionarily speaking, they just moved into our neighborhood yesterday.

Morally, though...?   Is it really okay to kill another human from half a world away while risking nothing more than thumb sprains ourselves, regardless of how "evil" that person is?  Who's gonna decide who's evil, anyway?  We might generally agree here in the US of A that those Al Quaeda leaders oughta go, but how long before we target neighborhood drug dealers, or people with opposing political points of view?  Bill O'reilly or Roger Ailes with drones to fly drones...!?  And no human has been bitten yet by a Frankensquito; we have NO IDEA what the ramifications of such an occurrence would be.  What if one of them bit a drone?  Holy shit!

Ah, the perils of Mordant Science and Technology.  But 'twas ever thus: at Los Alamos, for instance, there was some question among that group of genius physicists that splitting the atom would set off an uncontrollable chain reaction that would destroy the planet. A small chance, but a chance, nonetheless.  Thank Shiva the weenies were overridden, 'cause that whole nuclear thing has worked out pretty damn well, doncha think?

No shows this week or next, I'm afraid; work this week, vaca at Chautauqua next week.  But on Saturday, Aug. 11, from 7-11 in the PM the WOOL Block Party will be happening at the Waypoint Center in beautiful downtown Bellows Falls, VT.  There'll be several bands, lots of food, and a cash bar tended by yours truly.  I'd love to have you stop by, and it's for a very worthy cause:  helping to keep WOOL FM on the air.  Hope you can make it.

* It's from a Van song, sort of.   Called "Enlightenment."